This paper is a condensed presentation of the phonetics and phonology of Standard Italian, compared to the most prestigious local accents, viz. those of Florence, Milan and Rome. Historically based on the Florentine pronunciation, and traditionally identified with it, Standard Italian is nowadays used by trained speakers such as stage actors and (but less and less so) radio and TV speakers. The present paper aims at depicting the most salient features of Standard Italian, still a matter of primary reference in language courses, comparing them with the characteristic features of the three most prominent local varieties, with which the foreign learner is most likely to be confronted. All traditional (and sometimes widely debated) issues of Italian phonetics/phonology are addressed in the most ecumenical setting possible.

This paper presents findings on the articulatory and prosodic conditioning of Italian (lexical and post-lexical) geminate and non-geminate consonants. Phonetic and phonological prominence interact, resulting in a durational contrast which is not uniformly robust. So-called ‘inherent’ geminates are also found to be long post-consonantally, contrary to received wisdom, and do not form ‘supergeminates’ in conditions of postlexical gemination. Formant analysis of laterals reveals possible non-durational properties of gemination, with evidence for a more palatalised tongue configuration in geminates. Implications for the structural status of gemination are discussed.

This study describes the frequencies of the first two formants of monophthongs produced by male RP speakers in four age groups: aged 20–25, 35–40, 50–55, and 65–73 years in 2001. The eleven monophthongs were spoken in /hVd/ contexts by five men in each age group. The eleven words, together with nineteen filler words chosen to distract attention from the purpose of the experiment, were randomized four times and read by each speaker in citation form, for a total of 880 items. F1 and F2 frequencies were measured in Hz and ERB-rate. As expected, in younger compared with older speakers, F1 is higher in /ε/ and especially /æ/, and F2 is higher in /u:/ and /υ/. Other vowels varied in overall dispersion of F1 or F2, but no other differences between age groups were observed. There is evidence that the oldest age group to show change in a vowel's quality has particularly large differences between individuals, so that, collectively, members of that group span much of the quality range from ‘conservative’ (older groups) to ‘progressive’ (younger groups). Such so-called ‘break groups’ have implications for theoretical explanations of sound change.

This paper provides articulatory and acoustic data on voiceless implosive stops in Seereer-Siin, an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo family spoken in Senegal. Seereer is characterized by pairs of voiced and voiceless implosive stops in three places of articulation. These pairs are phonemically contrastive in lexical items. Oral air pressure measurements from Seereer stops uphold Clements & Osu's (2002) proposal that implosives and other non-explosive stops are characterized by the absence of positive oral air pressure rather than the presence of negative oral air pressure during occlusion. Acoustic data show that voiceless implosives are characterized by a short period of silence ranging from approximately twenty to fifty milliseconds before the onset of prevoicing prior to release. These findings replicate to a certain extent those of Faye & Dijkstra (1997).

A. C. Gimson was editor of Le Maître Phonétique (m.f.), which evolved into the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, for 25 years from 1950. Besides his general editorial supervision, he provided those publications with two of his own early articles, over 30 reviews and numbers of congratulatory and obituary tributes. He gradually phased out the short transcribed passages of various languages he and others had provided for learners and teachers: they had become a less significant element among IPA adherents. His encouragement of progressively more substantial contributions to the pages of the m.f. inevitably led to its 1970 major transformation, with normal orthography, into the present Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

This paper discusses techniques, including the Braille IPA, which are useful for the full inclusion of blind and visually impaired students into the phonetics classroom. Topics include transcribing, reading transcription, access to textbooks and classroom management. Suggestions for making the classroom more accessible have the added advantage of creating better access to information for the sighted students as well. The material may also be useful to blind phonetics instructors who teach sighted students.

Dutch is a language spoken by about 20 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium. This region is not only characterised by a complex dialect situation, but also by the use of two institutionalised varieties of the Standard language: Netherlandic Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and is documented in Collins & Mees (1982), Mees & Collins (1983) and Gussenhoven (1999), while Belgian Dutch is spoken in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) by approximately 6 million speakers. This variety is the same as what is commonly referred to internationally as ‘Flemish’. However, the term ‘Flemish’ is avoided here since it erroneously suggests that this language is different from the one spoken in the Netherlands: the lexical and syntactic differences between the two language varieties are very small. Nevertheless, there are significant phonetic differences as well as substantial regional variability within the two speech communities.

Central Arrernte is the language of an area centred on the present-day town of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It is one of a group of dialects or closely-related languages spoken or formerly spoken over most of the southeast quarter of the Northern Territory and extending on the east side into the far-western part of Queensland; a slightly less closely-related language extends south into the north-central part of South Australia. They include varieties using the names Anmatyerr, Alyawarr and Antekerrepenh as well as several varieties using the name Arrernte with (nowadays) English geographical qualifiers. The major surviving varieties, Eastern, Central and Western Arrernte, Eastern and Western Anmatyerr, Southern and Northern Alyawarr each have several hundred to a thousand speakers, and are still being learned by many of the children, who grow up bilingual (in English) or multilingual. Breen (2001) is a brief introduction to the phonology of these languages.

Tamambo is an Oceanic language spoken on the western half of the island of Malo in northern Vanuatu. There are at least 3000 speakers of the language, most of them living on Malo, with several hundred residing on the neighboring island of Santo and in the country's capital, Port Vila. Many speakers are also fluent in Bislama (an English-lexifier creole spoken in Vanuatu), one of three official languages. A dialect of Tamambo spoken on the eastern half of the island is now almost extinct, the main phonetic differences from the western dialect being the lack of prenasalized stops and labialized consonants, and the short articulation of vowels. Previous phonetic work on Tamambo is limited to a descriptive grammar of the language (Jauncey 1997).